AlpineAI AG is firmly rooted in the Swiss research and innovation ecosystem and collaborates with the Mindfire Foundation and leading universities of applied sciences, among others. AlpineAI has been in use at ZHAW (Zurich University of Applied Sciences) since the summer of 2024, starting with 50 pilot users and gradually scaling up since then, which demonstrates that the platform is designed to handle even complex organizational structures.

The proximity to universities and research institutions shapes the ongoing development of the AlpineAI platform: requirements from teaching, research, and administration are directly incorporated into AlpineAI AG’s product roadmap.

To get started with AlpineAI, all you need is a device with an internet connection and a current browser. No installation, activation by your university's IT department, or prior training is required.

Technical:

• Computer, laptop, tablet, or smartphone with an internet connection.
• A modern web browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge) or the AlpineAI mobile app for iOS and Android. Optionally, the AlpineAI Outlook plugin for working directly within your email program.

Organizational:

• Registration with AlpineAI AG and a valid license. Standard and Premium licenses cover up to 9 users; for entire departments or university IT departments, the Enterprise package applies for 10 or more licenses.
• A defined use case (e.g., literature review, grant applications, interview transcription, administrative correspondence).

Legal:

• You accept the General Terms and Conditions (GTC) of AlpineAI AG and enter into a Data Processing Agreement (DPA).
• For data subject to official, professional, or other legal confidentiality obligations, the Supplementary Agreement on the Processing of Confidential Data also applies, which strictly limits access to your data in plain text by contract.
• For recordings made with the Listener, you must obtain the prior verbal consent of all participants (Art. 179ter of the Swiss Criminal Code).

Once you've registered, AlpineAI is ready to use right away—even in the middle of the semester and with no lead time.

From the very first second after registration, you can conduct research in AlpineAI, summarize a paper, set up an assistant using your own documents, or record a meeting. Standard operation does not require any involvement from your university’s IT department—neither SSO, whitelisting, nor API integration. For further training, AlpineAI AG offers a six-lesson e-learning course as well as dedicated workshops covering an introduction, prompting training, and exercises based on everyday university life. For enterprise setups involving integrations, we’ll work with you to plan the technical setup as part of the implementation process.

The AlpineAI Outlook plugin is an extension for Microsoft Outlook that brings the platform’s features directly into the email program. At universities, it primarily helps reduce the workload associated with administrative correspondence: student inquiries, scheduling, and correspondence with international partners. It summarizes information, drafts suggested responses, and translates between German, English, and other national languages.

You work entirely within Outlook, without having to switch to a separate application. You can install the add-in yourself via "Get Add-Ins" in Outlook; no development effort is required. The plugin is included in both the Standard and Premium licenses. For more details, see Products.

The AlpineAI platform supports all of Switzerland's national languages as well as English, which makes it easier to switch between working languages in the international research community.

AlpineAI’s full range of features is available in all of these languages: You can analyze English-language academic literature, draft a proposal in German, and have teaching materials translated. Listener, AlpineAI’s transcription feature, also supports German, English, French, and Italian for lectures, interviews, and meetings, and reliably recognizes Swiss German—which is particularly relevant for qualitative interviews with participants who speak dialect. It understands Romansh, though the quality is somewhat lower.

AlpineAI currently uses Mistral Large 3 as its primary language model and is constantly switching to the best available model.

For academic use, AlpineAI AG specifically evaluates the models it uses with regard to English-language academic literature, the processing of long texts such as papers and grant proposals, and the reliability of citations. AlpineAI AG runs all models on its own hardware in Switzerland. This ensures that your university is not subject to vendor lock-in. For more information on the model-agnostic approach, see Products.

No, AlpineAI AG does not use research data to train language models. This assurance is enshrined in the contract: Customer inputs are not fed back into the language model and are not used for its further development (Section 4.4 of the Terms and Conditions).

Section 4.4 of the Terms and Conditions also states that any content you create or generate using the platform belongs to you; AlpineAI AG makes no claim to intellectual property rights in such content. Your content remains on AlpineAI AG’s own hardware in Swiss data centers. All individuals who come into contact with client data in the course of operations are contractually bound to confidentiality (Section 4.4 of the General Terms and Conditions), and access is governed by a role-based least-privilege principle. Unpublished manuscripts, draft proposals, and research data thus remain in your possession.

No, prior anonymization or pseudonymization is not required to use the AlpineAI platform. 

You may therefore enter unpublished manuscripts, draft proposals, interview transcripts, and personal data from teaching and administrative contexts in their original form. For data subject to official, professional, or other legal confidentiality requirements, the supplementary agreement on the processing of confidential data—which AlpineAI AG enters into with corporate clients—also applies. According to this agreement, AlpineAI AG employees and engaged subcontractors are granted access to this data in plain text only on a need-to-know basis and only with your prior individual approval, in the event of an urgent emergency requiring business continuity, or pursuant to an enforceable order from a competent Swiss authority.

As the data controller, you decide whether to anonymize data in individual cases. The decisive factors remain your legal basis, the consent of the study participants, and any requirements set by the ethics committee. For information on how plaintext access is contractually restricted, see the “Security” section.

Whether you are required to inform employees and researchers separately about the use of AlpineAI depends on the data protection laws applicable to your university. As a university, you remain the data controller under data protection law; AlpineAI AG acts as a data processor based on the Data Processing Agreement (DPA). Your record of processing activities and the respective purpose of processing are also decisive factors. As a general rule, it is sufficient for your privacy policy to cover processing by data processors and to list AlpineAI AG as a Swiss data processor.

When using the listener to record lectures, meetings, or interviews, the consent of all participants is also required (Art. 179ter of the Swiss Criminal Code); a verbal notice at the beginning, followed by explicit consent, is sufficient. We recommend full transparency and consultation with your data protection officer. AlpineAI AG will provide you with all the information needed for your processing inventory and for a data protection impact assessment (DPIA) upon request.

AlpineAI AG processes research and personal data on a clearly defined contractual basis in accordance with the Swiss Data Protection Act (DSG) and the EU GDPR. Customers accept the General Terms and Conditions (GTC) and enter into a Data Processing Agreement (DPA). For data subject to official, professional, or other legal confidentiality obligations, AlpineAI AG also provides a supplementary agreement for the processing of confidential data.

As the data controller, you retain control over the processing: AlpineAI AG processes your data in accordance with the General Terms and Conditions, the Data Processing Agreement, and your documented instructions (Section 1.1 of the Data Processing Agreement). AlpineAI AG processes content data on its own hardware in Swiss data centers. The Data Processing Agreement (AVV) limits processing to Switzerland and the EEA; all subcontractors are disclosed in Annex 3 of the AVV, along with the purpose and location of processing, and are contractually obligated to maintain the same level of protection. This is verified externally: AlpineAI AG is certified to ISO 27001:2022 for information security and to the VDSZ (Ordinance on Data Protection Certifications, SR 235.13), both issued by the Swiss Association for Quality and Management Systems (SQS). In addition, the solution has been reviewed in several cantons as part of a data protection impact assessment (DPIA).

All documents are publicly available; for more details, please visit the security page.

Yes, AlpineAI can be integrated into a university’s existing software environment. The AlpineAI API platform (REST) enables integration with your existing specialized applications—such as learning management systems, research databases, or archiving systems—so that AlpineAI’s features are available directly within your existing work environments.

Technical details on endpoints and authentication can be found on the API platform. The Outlook plugin, which works directly within the email program, is ready to use with no development effort required. We are constantly expanding our range of pre-built connectors: Let us know your integration needs, as real-world feedback is directly incorporated into our integration roadmap. Custom integrations are included in the Enterprise package for 10 or more licenses and are planned in collaboration with your university’s IT department.

AlpineAI AG offers universities three licensing models: Standard, Premium, and Enterprise.

The Standard license includes chat, web search, two assistants (up to 50 documents each / max. 100 MB), file upload, and the Outlook plugin. The Premium license includes the same set of features with a total of five assistants (up to 50 documents each / max. 100 MB) and adds preconfigured assistants as well as Listener technology for automated transcripts and reports. Both licenses are available for up to 9 individual user licenses and are billed monthly or annually, with the annual billing option offering a discount of up to 10 percent. For entire departments or university IT departments, AlpineAI AG offers an Enterprise package with full functionality—including integrations—for orders of 10 or more licenses; pricing is available upon request.